mfbrandi

Maybe Orlanth still thinks he is living boy-meets-girl or the “little tailor”, but you’d think some part of him would twig that he is in plot three:

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The man-who-learned-better; just what it sounds like—the story of a man who has one opinion, point of view, or evaluation at the beginning of the story, then acquires a new opinion or evaluation as a result of having his nose rubbed in some harsh facts.

(Apologies for the androcentrism; this is Heinlein in 1947.)

Now there is more than one way to take Storm’s breaking the world and subsequently signing up to Arachne Solara’s compromise with death, evil, and entropy — a compromise in which a thinning world slowly slides back into the chaos from which it emerged. One could say that in the world of time, all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and I have a deal of sympathy with that view. But I don’t think that is the take of Orlanth or the Orlanthi, who continue to rail against (at least two of) the forces they and their kin unleashed, twisted, and created (i.e. death, chaos, and the devil).

So among the other aspects, wouldn’t we expect to see a cult of Orlanth Penitent, worshipping an Orlanth in sackcloth and ashes who is very very sorry? Is there such a cult (or something similar)? If not, is that because neither the Orlanthi nor the Big O his bad self did learn better, or is it because they have another spin on Oedipal regicide and resurrection which enables all concerned to keep their heads held proudly high? I bet some of you have imaginative, illuminating, and entertaining takes on this; hit us with them.

3 hours ago, JRE said:

The spike is very important in Dragon Pass, as it was just south of it, and it is most of what we know about Glorantha, but it is not all.

A very helpful post, but has Dragon Pass moved, was it once bigger, or is it now “just north” of Magasta’s Pool/the centre of Glorantha? I am confused — as usual!

27 minutes ago, David Scott said:

One thing I can tell you for sure, Orlanth Adventurous isn't a mask of Lanbril or any other thief god (Greg made that very clear when I asked him).

I had a chat with Yelm about this, and this is what he told me (through his spittle-flecked beard):

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Some other thief god? No. Orlanth is the very type of a thief: he stole my wife, my throne, half my family, and my life. Me, rightful emperor of the universe! Adventurous, schmadvanturous — what is an “adventurer” but a prettied-up cutpurse, footpad, highwayman, pirate, assassin, or regicide? Well? Tell me! What?!

At this point, he had plasma shooting out of his ears, and he had to retreat to his padded cell withdraw to his imperial staterooms.

3 hours ago, Darius West said:

I mean, time is literally an abstract concept with no absolute physics that is slowly destroying the universe and consuming everything that has meaning. 

Time, entropy, the heat death of the universe — but we are both going to be dead long before the universe is, so let’s not sweat that. If it is just a fear of one’s own death writ large, should I conclude from the fact that I don’t want to die today that anything short of immortality is unacceptable?

We should probably be grateful that we don’t share a worldview with HPL. [Bang! Bang! Bang! — That’s me nailing a jumbo-sized crate of worms firmly shut.] I sometimes think he is so successful (post mortem) because his fans don’t share his fears. (Cthulhu plushies!) We won’t play a game where we pretend to be scared of things we are actually scared of; we will play a game where we pretend to be scared of cute things like relativity and five-winged tentacled cucumbers. Much safer.

11 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

Or Moorock's Behold the Man.

Presumably Nick’s guy with the pliers was supposed to be the anti-Glogauer.

Moorcock quotes Jung, which bears on the ‘imitate your god’ theme here:

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We Protestants must sooner or later face this question: Are we to understand the “imitation of Christ” in the sense that we should copy his life and, if I may use the expression, ape his stigmata: or in the deeper sense that we are to live our own proper lives as truly as he lived his in all its implications? It is no easy matter to live a life that is modelled on Christ’s, but it is unspeakably harder to live one’s own life as truly as Christ lived his.

Which is one answer to ‘should I contrive to lose to Zorak Zoran?’

6 hours ago, Nick Brooke said:

Sedenya’s equivalent piece is now the Red Emperor, just saying.

Well, he is a tool, but sometimes I like to think of him as Anaander Mianaai.

8 hours ago, Jeff said:

The archetypes and patterns of the God Time are eternal and fixed … Sometimes we can even interact ourself with the archetypes and patterns of the God Time - that's what we call Heroquesting.

One way to read “interact” would be that there is a give and take between the heroquester and the entities and events of God Time: both are changed, efficient causation goes both ways. However, the fixity of God Time has been clearly asserted, so that is not what is meant by “interaction” here. We are not fighting Fritz’s Change War.

So in what sense does the heroquester interact with the God Time? If I were to say “Sometimes I can change myself (and perhaps the world around me) by meditating on the unchangeable archetypes and patterns of the God Time - that's what we call Heroquesting” by how many miles would I have missed your point? On this conception of heroquesting, one cannot really bring back help from the God Time, because one cannot have any effect upon it (as it is fixed). Heroquesting isn’t time travel — which is a delusion — it is more like thinking about history. Doesn’t sound so sexy. Might make for saner religion.

16 minutes ago, EricW said:

Of course if you wanted to say bring proof Orlanth is part of the Lunar pantheon back to the mundane plane, expect a rough ride on your return journey.

Oh, I don’t know, though: from the perspective of Yelm, one rebel looks much like another. Just direct your feet to the sunny side of the street.

3 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

Likewise, her anatomy leads to an interesting conversation regarding gender and sexual identity.

The spotted hyena is indeed a wonderful beast.

If I had my quirky way (never going to happen), I would drive a wedge between:

1. experimental heroquesting where we time-travel back — sideways? — to godtime to break reality/indulge in a spot of change war;
2. ordinary religion where we take a load of psychedelics and ritually re-enact our gods’ myths.

Gloranthans will — for the most part — not grasp the distinction.

Experimental heroquesting is some heavy shit: “You want to go up against Zorak Zoran for real, rash mortal? Good luck with that. Don’t tell him I know you.” If players insist, consider having them time-travel into someone else’s past, so any effects of the quest are on another branch of history — see, for example, The Female Man for ways to do this without it being a totally futile exercise.

I am not saying never indulge in proper change war, but do think about the power differential between the PCs and the gods in your Glorantha (I imagine this varies quite a bit). If you do pull off the edit, it will have always been that way, so don’t expect any thanks from a grateful community when you return — if your community is even there when you return: you may have edited your own parents out of history. Change warriors don’t make good community champions, but they are great deracinated depressives.

On the other hand, I would have most or all of a cult’s magic depend on ordinary religion. Monrogh’s “proofs” are in effect a con trick on a bunch of heads, but that’s OK because their magic is essentially faith-powered, not god-powered. The faithful won’t see it that way, of course, but then they are usually several peyote buttons detached from reality.

7 hours ago, Ali the Helering said:

A recent discovery of a dedicatory plaque from a woman has proven that female membership of the cult was not unknown.

I have nothing against the idea of women initiates of Mithras — and would definitely hope for them in Gloranthan Mithras-clone cults — but do cough up the reference rather than leaving us hanging.

In trying to chase down something for the Good Shepherd thread (Mithras is doing the rounds at the moment), I stumbled across this, which fits nicely with the White Bull theme:

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Not long ago Alison Griffith [“Mithras, Death, and Redemption in Statius, Thebaid I, 719-20”, Latomus 60, 2001, 108-123] has drawn our attention to the important role of the Moon, the representative of feminine principle, inside the Mysteries of Mithras. The bust of the goddess Luna is a conventional motif of the standard Mithraic tauroctony. In the majority of cases it is situated in the right corner of this cultic scene, usually in the form of a woman’s head adorned with the moon sickle. But according to some interpretations, Luna appears in the polysemous Mithraic symbolism once more, even in a more important role: as a white bull slain by Mithras. This identification could be explained either by the transformation of the old Indo-European myth about the killing of a lunar bull in the Mithraic circles or by the application of astrological rules according to which the Moon gathers the most of his strength when passing through the constellation of Taurus, where the Moon’s “exaltation” occurs. This fact gains further importance, when we realize that Mithras was often identified with the Sun. The sacrifice of the bull then could be seen, at least on one level, as a victory of the Sun over the Moon. On the other hand, it could be considered as an important act of creation and salvation. The whole scene would thus be loaded with an internal tension of great proportions: the power of Mithras to create earthly life and bring salvation depends on his ability to catch, overcome and slay his counterpart – the lunar bull, earthly representative of the feminine moon deity.

Although the astrology won’t work for Glorantha, this could plundered by the “IO is a weapon against the Lunars” crowd, clowns like me who like to see Gloranthan protagonists as fighting themselves, and the “Argrath is an agent/stooge of Lunar Utuma” mob. These may overlap, of course.

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More from Griffith on Mithras and the lunar bull here.

12 hours ago, Darius West said:

Well that's one perspective, but … clearly the Stormbulls of Prax are destroying the chaos that threatens them the most by following Argrath.

So here is a fable from real life with the serial numbers lightly filed down (or perhaps it is a universal bed-time story):

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The new big bad and the old big bad knock over the democratically elected government of a proud nation with a long history. These bad actors give power to the self-styled ‘king of kings’ in the fond belief that he will defend their interests. But autocrats will be autocrats: murders of dissenters, secret police, … — you know the drill. There are also reforms — votes for women, increased literacy, economic growth, food for children, crap like that — but some people don’t like the reforms and some don’t think they go far enough. Should the revolutionaries throw their lot in with a nut job whose grammar and prose style they sneer at and who longs for the good old days when men were men feared god and women knew their place? Anyway, they did, and the populace were gifted a fresh set of state-sponsored thugs to beat them down. So now everything is just fine.

The enemy of your enemy is seldom your friend, and if you think they are just a tool to be tossed aside when the job is done, you may find you have another think coming. Sometimes the cure is just as bad as the disease … sometimes it is much worse.

Me? I would be happy to throw the gods into the gobbling jaws of the Devil — especially if, contra current canon, it were Kajabor — but then I don’t see time as a cosmic horror, so clearly I have been staring into the void for too long, and chaos has taken my soul.

Nietzsche warned us to take care when fighting monsters, and I assumed that when Glorantha was populated with roid-raging superheroes head-butting their budgie mirrors to rid the world of cosmic evil that we were being offered a similar warning, but Gloranthaphiles do seem to like to take sides. Perhaps it is all done in fun, but sometimes I wonder.

2 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

I will ask you very politely to please not use my name in a mocking way

My apologies, Bill. No offence meant.

3 hours ago, jajagappa said:

There are giant ground sloths … woodland bison … Deer, bear, wolves.

Wild pigs/boar — dangerous only if cornered?

4 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

there are sheep (the regular people), wolves (who want to eat them - criminals or foreign enemies) and shepherds (who protect the sheep but need to be in charge of them …)

And pretty soon, you cannot tell the wolves from the shepherds.

In fairness to cops and soldiers, I think there are plenty of groups who consider themselves superior to the average run of humanity — pick your favourite geeky fandom or self-imagined pariah elite — but although they are wrong, too, they maybe don’t all have guns.

3 hours ago, Jose said:

I was looking for a reason why the good shepherd was called "the good shepherd" … What do you think? 

Surely, the reference must be to old JC (John 10). But whether the Good Shepherd’s worship’s being supplanted by Waha and the Storm Bull is a dig at Christianity or a comment on the sad state of Prax, I could not say.

3 minutes ago, Bill the barbarian said:

Too bleak for me!

Sorry, Bill. Management speak gets my goat. And this bit sounds positively Nysalorean/Gbajian:

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To act as the shepherd leader in all that is said and done — to build through mentor example a team of brave refulgent shepherds to ensure the longest tail for market opportunity.

“Refulgent” is a dead giveaway, right? Bright Empire MLM — no plague too small or too large for our in-house experts.

2 hours ago, Bill the barbarian said:

A leader... is like a shepherd

Sooner or later — lamb or mutton — the flock is led to the abattoir.

5 hours ago, EricW said:

Maybe the final step in lunar enlightenment is Rashoranic illumination, the realisation that life has no meaning, that shunning the oblivion of the void is simply delaying the inevitable. 

I was thinking only that life is finite and that that is fine.

Is life “meaningful” only if prolonged indefinitely or repeated on the hamster wheel of reincarnation?

6 hours ago, EricW said:

hidden behind the glamour is a void … people who ascend to the moon eventually go missing

Well, an eventual and permanent return to the Void is fine. It is a matter of whether they were ready to jump into the memory crater, or whether someone had to stamp on their fingers as they clung to the rim.

42 minutes ago, Joerg said:

The "Bronze Age Collapse" was a phenomenon limited to the Fertile Crescent and adjacent territories.

Imagining a little local difficulty to be a global apocalypse is an occupational hazard in pint-in-hand Gloranthan punditry. Never mind the quality, feel the width myth.

2 hours ago, scott-martin said:

Is she the butcher?

How Oedipal!

Were Lionel Bart and company trying to tell us something about the multiple Argraths theory?

3 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

If you want a little more Bevara, you could easily include a shrine to her some place

Or taking a cue from real life (e.g. Sumer), people could have mini-shrines or effigies — “personal gods” — at home to deities that get no representation in places of public worship.